A conventional product development cycle begins when an actuary conceives of an insurance product, including terms, features, benefits, riders, etc. associated with the product. The actuary drafts a specification outlining the features of the product and provides the specification to a computer programmer, who creates a product model. The programmer creates the product model based on the content of the specification, and the product model simulates effects of the product (based on the features) in different scenarios (e.g., purchase by clients of different age, medical history, gender, race, employment status, etc.). A quality assurance engineer executes the product model on the scenarios to determine whether the product will behave as expected. If the product model does not produce an expected output, the product model is returned to the computer programmer for troubleshooting, and/or back to the actuary for revision of the product specification.
The conventional product development cycle requires significant company resources in terms of time and cost. For example, the actuary, after completing the specification, may have to consult with the computer programmer regarding the development of the product model and the quality assurance engineer regarding the output of the product model. The computer programmer may be required to, based on the output reviewed by the quality assurance engineer, create several versions of the product model, which then must be tested by the quality assurance engineer. Any changes an actuary may want to make to the model, either in the current product or in designing future products, would require re-programming of the product model.
The present invention provides improved methods and systems for streamlining the insurance product development process by reducing or eliminating the need to independently develop computer program code.